Allow migration if you have enough rep on both the source and the target site
(the target reputation required could be a bit lower, say 5001)

That way questions could only be migrated by users familiar with the scope of both sites who can really estimate where the question is better. Maybe those who don't have the rep on the target site could still be able to cast a flagging-only-but-not-counting-as-vote vote...

Perhaps require 1 or 2 people who vote to migrate to have this minimum rep? That way, everyone can vote to migrate but it requires approval from someone who's known to understand the other side.
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marcogJan 6 '11 at 10:27

3 Answers
3

I'm at 12K + on SO, but under 1k on both SF and SU. I've been migrating questions to both for over a year without any complaints (that I know of).

I think this would delay migration of questions that really should be shipped off somewhere else before they start getting answers, so the whole process is less confusing to the original poster. I think this is somewhat self defeating for the self moderating aspect of stack exchange.

Perhaps, simply require that the person migrating has sufficient reputation on the target site to understand its scope and community, say ... 250 - 500, as well as the usual reputation on the original site.

If you have 500 rep on math.se, I'm reasonably sure that you understand what is and is not appropriate there. I'm not even a member there, so I would refrain from sending them a question.

I think your suggestion is the simplest path to avoid irritating the users of the receiving community, and most importantly, the person who asked a question.

I think if you have the rep to migrate from a particular site, when you choose to close and then select off-topic, the list that comes up should only include sites where you have a certain rep level (I'm thinking 1000). So if you are not active on a site, it doesn't exist to you for the purpose of migrating to, anyway. This should reduce the number of WTF migrations that are promptly closed when they get to the new site.

We now require that a migrated question have at least one tag in common with the target site before we will allow it to be migrated there.

We also disallow blacklisted tags on the target site, and apply proper tag synonym rules for the target site.

Diamond mods can skip the final check and migrate even if there are no tags in common, but for regular close votes, if the final check does not pass, the question is simply closed as off topic and not migrated anywhere.

As for the request itself: unworkable. This would limit migrations so incredibly severely in practice that we might as well stop migrating questions anywhere. It is exceedingly rare for users to have multiple high rep accounts in the network.

+1 that's a pretty good start, although this might cause the appearance of metatags-for-migration by some creative minds. Still, I remember even yourself having mentioned² that the same tag can have an entirely different meaning on another site (although it's unlikely if there actually is a valid reason for a migration path to exist) ²) I think it was in response to a "one place to ask all questions and let tags determine on which SE site to put it" suggestion
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Tobias KienzlerFeb 18 '11 at 8:14